A few months ago, I read an article about Indianapolis Museum of Art's 'web sprint'. The sprint involved the museum's digital team leaving their office and taking up residence in a co-working space, with the task of redesigning the museum's website, Art Babble, in a 24-hour period.

After reading the article, I wrote a blog post in which I asked: wouldn't it be cool if the big national museums – Tate, V&A, the British Museum etc – donated their digital teams to regional museums for 24 hours every couple of months? The post sparked an interesting conversation on Twitter, in which someone commentated that what I was suggesting could be called pro bono.

Pro bono, or pro bono publico to use the full Latin phrase, is the term used to describe professional work done in a voluntary capacity for the public good. For many years, pro bono work has been carried out by big law firms and corporate giants, and in recent years this work has helped fulfil these organisations' commitment to 'corporate social responsibility'.

I did a little bit more digging and came across Very Nice, who in their own words are "a global design, business and innovation consultancy that dedicates over 50% of its efforts towards pro-bono services". In practice, Very Nice has carried out over $300,000 of pro bono work for some 130 clients.

Should cultural giants offer pro bono services?

Today, an increasing number of cultural organisations have grown to such a size that they have more staff than in the individual offices of many multinational companies. So, is it time that we started to demand that these cultural giants also carry out pro bono work? And could this pro bono work help to create a more digitally engaged and literate cultural sector?

If we take for example any of the big national museums, each of these institutions have 'digital teams' and multiple members of staff that are in dedicated digital roles. Compare that situation to the bulk of smaller museums and cultural organisations that in total have only a handful of staff – employing someone to fulfil a digital communications role, let alone digital R&D, is considered an unattainable aspiration.

While hack days and geeks-in-residence programmes have provided organisations of all sizes with R&D opportunities, these are often short-term projects. And although such initiatives do have a lasting legacy through outputs such as apps, games or mobile websites, and increased digital and process literacy within the organisations that participate, smaller organisations still struggle to find a consistent and strategic way to embrace digital.

Rather than simply mirroring the ethics and existing models for corporate social responsibility (CSR), the cultural sector could adopt and adapt a new model tailored to the good of the cultural sector as a whole. CSR could become cultural sector responsibility – an ethical model that allows large national cultural organisations to consider the impact their work has on developing the cultural sector as a whole.

This model could inform how these organisations disseminate information to medium-size and small grassroots organisations. Ultimately, the cultural sector is stronger together. Small organisations provide the foundations for those that go on to work in the top national institutions, and if small cultural organisations are being left behind digitally, then who will train the next generation of creative technologists needed to lead the digital departments of the Royal Opera House, National Museums Scotland, or the Royal Ballet?

Pro bono in practice

Pro bono work may provide a valuable and sustainable link between short-term projects. If cultural giants carried out a percentage of pro bono work as a condition of funding, then the sector as a whole could be richer for it. If staff from the digital team at Tate, for example, each selected an organisation that they would like to work with over the course of the year, a mutually beneficial relationship could develop.

For small organisations, that digital expertise and strategic guidance would allow them to become more digitally literate, and begin to innovate in a sustainable rather than flash-in-the-pan manner. Equally, for a member of staff from a bigger organisation, this relationship would provide opportunities to think and work outside of their institutional silos, to gain fresh perspectives that could in turn add value to the work they do in their own job, and more broadly to the institution as a whole.

Pro bono cultural partnerships could be modelled on knowledge transfer partnerships, which are project partnerships that link academia with industry. Pro bono partnerships could link the giants of the cultural sector with its vibrant and dynamic lifeblood – grass roots arts organisations. These partnerships would be strategic and sustainable and, ultimately, would help smaller cultural organisations move digital to the core of what they do.